Have you said, “I love you” hundreds to thousands of times only to find it being less effective than your intention?

If that is the case, you may not be surprised to know that there are many more ways to say I love you than verbally expressing it. In fact, there are seven ways to communicate it and three ways your partner can perceive it.

To make it even more interesting, people perceive things either through, visual, auditory or kinesthetic means. Multiply 3 x 7, = 21 different ways to say I love you. That makes a total of 21 ways to say I love you to someone. WOW, that sounds rather complicated don’t you think.

Love may be a very splendored thing but it is also a very confusing thing. Let’s try to make some sense of it for you.

Of the articles I have read on ways to say I love you I have notice they share many ways to do it. Sort of the shotgun approach to love but not very focused for those of you who want to be effective in your efforts to love someone.

Gary Chapman wrote in his bestseller, The Five Love Languages, if you are not speaking the language of your lover, you are not able to get the message of love through clearly to them. He named the languages as follows:

• Words of Affirmation
• Quality Time
• Receiving Gifts
• Acts of Service
• Physical Touch

So, there are five ways so far and in my experience we can add two more:

• Unconditional Acceptance
• Showering Security

Seven ways to say I love you and again, if you are not saying it the way your partner perceives it, it is like you are not saying it at all. Is it any wonder that there is so much confusion about love and that people search and search for it but never find it.

Part of the problem is that you most likely do not even know which way you need to be loved. It takes some introspection to determine your own love preference.

Learning to love yourself is one of the most important elements in being able to love another and you are the first one you need to love. Loving yourself is just as complicated as loving another because you have to know exactly how you need to be loved.

Once you have mastered the art of communicating love, you will be able to recognize in an instant the way anyone you meet needs to be loved. You might want to rekindle the love you have with a partner or be seeking a new love altogether. All your relationships will benefit from your newfound skills.

How you acquire these skills is through study and practice. It is quite unreasonable to expect to know how to love yourself or someone else without a good grounding in proper experience.